My Journey Back To Self

A Good Time To Be Here

It is November. The weather gods have smiled upon us with sunshine and seventy degrees.

(Many would say the baseball gods have also smiled upon us as the Cubs are in the World Series.)

It is a good time to be in Chicago.

I pull on a pair of brown corduroy trousers from the Salvation Army. Ralph Lauren. Six dollars. Boot-cut and too long in the legs for my not quite 5-foot, 3-inch body.

I slide my hand into the left, front pocket and pull out two small, slippery stubs. Used metro tickets from Paris.

I smile. Wistful.

I’ve been back just eight days but already Paris seems so far away.

The baguette I never eat here but cannot not eat there. Both doughy and solid. Formidable and yielding. I’ve never found anything quite like it at home.

The coffee. Short. Dark. Thick. Served in little cups and drank leisurely in a café, or standing up at a bar, but never taken to go.

The woman who says over coffee, “It’s like there was an empty chair waiting for you, and you slipped right in it … as if you were always there.” And the faces around the table nodding in agreement.

I try to conjure this up in my body. The bread. The coffee. These people who in a matter of days became my people. And I became theirs.

The pastry. The poetry.

The feeling I have every time I find myself in Paris … that my heart might burst if I’m not careful. The feeling I have always been here and will always be here.

But muscle memory fails me … for I can see it, but not fully feel it. Not in my bones. At least not in this moment.

Perhaps it is because I am so here.

In Chicago on this 70-something November day on a bike that doesn’t quite fit me. A loaner from the mechanic until mine is fixed. Wheels out of true. Seat too low. I am more wrestling with it than riding. And yet, I feel the sides of my mouth curling into a smile when I do. My now 47-year-old body embracing the challenge.

Editing my book. Cooking soup. Applying for work.

Watching a Cubs game at a dive bar for no other reason than I have been invited and it sounds like fun.

I am too present here to fully feel there for more than a few moments. And I realize the gift in feeling the ground beneath me. The swish-swish of fallen leaves under my feet.

I have spent years wishing I was somewhere other than where I was — even in Paris — missing the moment.

My friend Paul recently asked why I “even bothered” to come back in the United States. “Your writing is pure poetry there. That is your place,” he says. Perhaps. But for now I am here.

I slip the tickets back in my pocket — so that I might find them again one day and be reminded. Of baguettes and coffee. Poetry and pastry. Of the people who held a chair for me … waiting.

That mid-October was a good time to be in Paris. And right now is a good time to be here.